On the Ability of AES S-Boxes to Secure Against Correlation Power Analysis

Abstract

Cryptographic substitution boxes (S-boxes) are an integral part of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). In this paper we conducted a simulation-based correlation power analysis (CPA) attack on AES implementations with different S-box structures. It shows that the abilities of AES and S-boxes to secure against CPA attack are correlated, and an evaluation of the ability of S-boxes to thwart CPA is presented in a quantitative way. By further exploiting the properties of S-boxes, an approximate linear relation between abilities of S-boxes to resist CPA and glitch power ratios of total power consumed by S-boxes is proved.